Recently in Travel Category

10:00 AM

Eid Mubarak! Back home it's Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, the first day of the Christmas shopping season, but here, in Abu Dhabi, it's the Eid Holiday, which commemorates the willingness of the prophet Ibrahim (PBUH) to sacrifice his son Ismail for God''s sake. Despite the fact that I hate traveling over Thanksgiving weekend, I find myself here in the new downtown campus building of NYU Abu Dhabi, awaiting a group of applicants who have been flown here from all parts of the globe as part of the "November Candidate Weekend."

Outside, it's summer weather: a lovely 85 Farenheit, though rain is predicted for Sunday night! As we walked into the building, we passed a group of men who were finishing up the ritual sacrifice of what looked like a lamb (which is one way that Eid is celebrated here). That was upsetting one of my colleagues, who's an animal rites activist, and I suspect the candidates will be taken around the other side of the building, in case any of them are not quite ready for that aspect of Islamic culture.

I'm thrilled to be here. After my last visit I was trying to figure out a way to get myself invited back sometime next term, so when the invitation came to take part in the Candidate Weekend, it seemed like too good an offer to pass up. (Luckily, my wife agreed!) The past year's work has been about building a curriculum and a faculty, but my colleagues on the Arts and Humanities Coordinating Group haven't had a chance to get a sense of what the students are actually going to be like. I've observed them, last night and at breakfast this morning, and they are indeed an amazing bunch. So I'm looking forward to watching them think like cultural critics from 75 minutes. Our subject? What else, but cosmopolitanism!

I picked up the first two seasons of the television show Freej at one of the duty-free shops in the Abu Dhabi airport. Freej is a 3D animated cartoon produced in Dubai, which has been a big hit in the Emirates since it debuted in 2006. The series depicts the lives of four friends -- Um Saeed, Um Allawi, Um Salood, and Um Khammas -- older women living in one of the more traditional neighborhoods in Dubai (freej means "neighborhood" in Emirati Arabic). They gather each day in Um Saeed's house to drink coffee and chat about their lives, and periodically they go off on little adventures. Each of the characters has distinctive traits (as well as color coding) and wears a niqab (veil). Um Saeed is short and highly educated and generally intiates the conversation; Um Allawi is tall and constantly trading stocks via laptop and cell phone; Um Saloom is forgetful and narcoleptic; and Um Khammas, a North African, is an acid-tongued singer and caterer who specializes in weddings.

The show and its creator Mohammed Saeed Harib (pictured below), were profiled in September in the New York Times.  The 31-year-old attended Northeastern University, where he and his peers watched episodes of South Park. Freej has something of South Park's irreverence, though it embodies Emirati values and foibles rather than North American. The ladies' talk isn't obscene, but it is colorful (at least as far as I can tell from the subtitles). A third season was shown, but the series is now on hiatus due largely to the global financial downturn.

I hadn't expected my children to take to the show. My nine-year-old can read the subtitles, but my five-year-old can't. I secretly hope that they would though, because it would be a way of exposing them to the culture of the Emirates and the Islamic world.

As an experiment, I put on the first episode, entitled "Ramadan," and began reading the subtitles aloud. The 15-minute show features the ladies sitting in Um Saeed's house moaning about how hungry they are, anticipating the feast that will come with nightfall, and clicking through television channels in search of something to watch. All they find, however, are shows promoting Islamic values, game shows, and sitcoms with titles like "Pain" or "Suffering." Finally, they break their fast and, stuffed, figure that there must finally be something enjoyable to watch on t.v. But all they find is that new show Freej. "Overhyped," Um Saeed complains, "just four old hags sitting around complaining. And that Um Khammas really brings the show down!" So Um Allawi faces the viewer, points the remote, clicks it, and the episode ends.

My kids were captivated and we've been watching it together for the past few days, daddy voicing the subtitles. We're almost done with season one. My younger son can't wait to start season two, because he's already figured out that it features Um Saeed's grandson and his hijinks.

My older son and I were out for a walk last Sunday, and I was telling him a little bit about my trip to Abu Dhabi. It'd be really fun place to spend a year, I told him, because it's summer there all the time, and we could travel to really interesting places like Egypt and India. And you could even learn a little Arabic.

He looked at me and said: "And then I could understand Freej without the subtitles!"

[Image of Mohammed Saeed Harib from the New York Times.]

Thursday morning, we headed out to the oasis city of Al Ain, about two hours east of Abu Dhabi, near the border with Oman. There we were met by Brian, an ex-pat who heads up the Emirates Natural History Group, which is interested in both the archeology and ecology of the Emirates. Brian was an incredibly knowledgeable guide to  these aspects  of the region, and he had suggested that, rather than take the typical museum and oasis tour of the city, we focus on the Al Mezyad Fort and the Hafit tombs, which (as he'd written to us in advance) "may be inaccessible soon as development plans for the area proceed." Our time was limited, because we had a 2:00 meeting with Deans and faculty from the United Arab Emirates University. Looking at those two sites proved to be an ideal excursion, because they were satisfyingly off-the-beaten track and got us out into the desert, away from tall, ultra-modern buildings.

To get to the Mezyad fort, we turned off the main road and drove up to a closed gate. Visiting the site, while not exactly discouraged, is apparently not exactly encouraged. The fort itself is an early 19th-century structure in the Portuguese style (blocky, with three round towers and one square one) that has been extensively restored -- it'll be torn down and redone at some point, if they can get the Afghan builders who know how to do mud brick properly and if the site isn't turned into a luxury bed-and-breakfast.

Meanwhile, some pieces of the restoration were carried and used to finish the restoration of the larger Al Jahili fort, built in 1898 by Sheikh Zayed the First ("the Great") and the venue this weekend for the New York Philharmonic's concert. We walked into the small living quarters, similar to the one in which the founding president of the UAE, King Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyam, lived as a child. Not exactly the lap of luxury. Brian stressed for us how recently it was that the population of Abu Dhabi lived in conditions that were primitive and how historically the population was always in danger of starvation due to the scarcity of food and water. Standing on the ramparts we could see the distant hills that made the location of the fort a chokepoint: the old  camel route had to come between these two sets of mountains meaning that those who possessed the fort could levy taxes on trade.

Reaching the Hafit tombs at the foot of Jawal Hafit took a little bit of off-roading (we borrowed the 4x4 that belonged to the Associate Dean for Humanities at UAEU, who would be our host later in the afternoon). A the foot of the mountain, we saw three reconstructed tombs -- the ones you see in brochures and guidebooks. Also, apparently, incorrectly reconstructed.


Brian showed us what an unexcavated tomb looks like: basically a pile of rocks, due to the fact that the tombs had been looted in antiquity and subjected to the sands of time (literally). No wonder then that so many were bulldozed during the search for oil in the area. Nevertheless, at other similar sites, there are apparently a multitude of unexcavated tombs -- and they're likely to remain so until someone is willing to spend the money to excavate a past that doesn't produce golden treasures.


Standing amidst these tombs, probably 3,500 to 4,000 years old, we were vividly struck by a  sense of the region's past. These are the kinds of experiences we hope that NYUAD students will be able to have -- indeed, we're hoping that some of the will actually be able to work on archeological sites and help the region recover its ancient history. 

We saw some camels too. Our guide had a lot to say about the state of the camel farming industry: apparently, unless your a fast, and therefore prized, racing camel, it's not much fun to be a camel. The ones we saw weren't the most regal specimens, and their feet were bound to prevent them from taking long strides and running away. My French Department colleague tried to make friends, but since we weren't giving them food or water, the camels weren't much interested in us.

We had lunch with colleagues from United Arab Emirates University, which is funded by the federal government and is a research institution. One of the things that we realized in the course of meeting with faculty from  American University of Sharjah, Zayed University, and UAEU is that these institutions have something that will be in relatively short supply at NYUAD: Emirati students. It's our hope that we'll be able to partner with these institutions so that their students and ours can interact in educational settings, thereby providing the students at NYUAD a chance to make local, as well as "global," connections.

We didn't make it to the famous Al Ain Oasis. Next trip.

By all accounts, the lecture that I gave for the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute on Wednesday night went well. The title of the talk was "Cosmopolitanism, Multiculturalism, and the Promise of Literature." Like Joanna's lecture on the Silk Road, it took place at the Al Mamoura Auditorium in the building that houses the Abu Dhabi Education Council, which is the group that serves as our sponsor in Abu Dhabi. Here's the blurb that I'd given them about the lecture:

Originating in the idea of the world citizen and conceived in contradistinction to nationalism, cosmopolitanism can be understood as a way of building community by embracing rather than avoiding difference. This lecture will explore the ways in which a cosmopolitan perspective responds to problems posed by contemporary Western multiculturalism. It will also suggest that literature offers distinctive resources for the cosmopolitan thinker.

In the lecture, which owes much to the work of Kwame Anthony Appiah and David Hollinger, I tried to tie together a number of elements from my recent scholarship and thinking: the problems posed by overly pluralist conceptions of multiculturalism; the problems posed by the desire for "cultural purity," the power of "emergent writing," Zoroastrianism, and Melville's Moby-Dick. In addition to serving as a way of tying together these strands, Moby-Dick was intended to offer a case study in the ways that a text can mobilize cosmopolitan perspectives and finally as an entree to the idea that "literature offers distinctive resources for the cosmopolitan thinker."

That idea is the least developed in my current work, but potentially the most intriguing. I wanted to get at the idea that great literature promotes a cosmopolitan embrace of difference because it often asks you to do precisely that: embrace a different consciousness than your own. In the case, for example, of reading a novel, what you do if you become immersed in it is to let the consciousness of another take over your own.

If you're interested, you can download the script that formed the basis of the lecture here.

The talk was also accompanied by PowerPoint that I hoped would make the lecture a little more vivid by presenting images and also the block quotes that I was using. I confess that I was worried that I had included too much material about Moby-Dick, a text that I'd assumed my audience had heard of but not read. I tried to solve the problem by telling stories about the text and anecdotes related to the text (in particular, the sinking of the whaleship Essex in the South Seas and Melville's reaction to reading Owen Chase's account of it). I tried to survey the audience: only one or two seemed to be asleep, and I really couldn't complain about that since I myself had succumbed to jet lag during my colleague Joanna's talk: apparently at precisely the moment that she made a reference to Zoroastrianism! (Whoops!)

The question and answer session was gratifyingly lively and gave me many things to think about. Indeed, I expect to be meditating on some of these questions more here in the days to come.

I had a question from a colleague at Zayed University about language differences, translation, and whether cosmopolitan conversation was predicated on a shared language. I tried to suggest that language was yet another gulf that the cosmopolitan tried to cross by whatever means he or she could and that one of the opportunities presented by the present moment is the fact that texts were so quickly translated and disseminated. And I suggested that one of the goals of the NYUAD literature program would be to make students aware of both the limitations and opportunities accompany the translation of any text.

Another colleague from Zayed asked whether my suggestion that literature offers an opportunity for cosmopolitan experience was limited to texts that don't themselves adopt a counter-cosmopolitan or fundamentalist attitude. I tried to suggest that in fact it would have been much more challenging to use exactly such a text as my case study, because I would like to be able to argue that even a counter-cosmopolitan text, insofar as it forces the reader to confront difference of perspective and consciousness, can encourage cosmopolitan thinking. And I talked a little about the way in which learning from the fundamentalist or from the provincial is the hardest thing for cosmopolitans to do today.

NYUAD Vice Chancellor Al Bloom gave me the opportunity to talk a little more about the interplay of sameness and difference, and I had the chance to talk a little about Anthony Appiah's slogan version of cosmopolitanism -- "universality plus difference" -- which I'd chosen to omit from the lecture and about my take on the recent history of cosmopolitan theory, including ideas about "rooted cosmopolitanism." I suggested that what can save  cosmopolitanism from being simply another Western idea imposed on everyone else is the idea that it is a "weak" conception of the good from a philosophical point of view. (Actually, in the event I didn't use the phrase "W of the good" when responding; I wish I had.) It's a structure, a container into which different ideas can be poured, so long as the ideas are compatible with the ideas of embracing difference and being willing to engage in dialogue across boundaries. A cosmopolitanism rooted in Abu Dhabi will have structural affinities with  cosmopolitanism rooted in New York, but also salient differences that enhance the cosmopolitan experience!

They put out a nice spread afterward, but I only had one nibble of it because so many people from the audience came up to ask questions and offer insights. I was particularly gratified to meet Alia Yunis, a novelist whose first book, The Night Counter, has been on my list of texts to add to read as part of my final revisions on the NYU Press book on emergent literatures. Now that I've met her, I've moved it to the top of my list. (She'll be reading at the conference on the 1001 Nights that Philip Kennedy has organized for the NYUAD Institute this December. Check out her website and you'll see why.)

With any luck, a number of  the people who said that they would e-mail me with further thoughts actually will! Meanwhile, i recorded the entire session and hopefully will have the courage to listen to the Q & A again soon. (You're never quite as good as you thought you were when you listen to the actual tape!) I'd like to keep the conversation that I started at Al Mamoura going, even if only (for now) here in the ether.

From the Mosque, we proceeded to a meeting with colleagues at Zayed University, which is a school for women that has campuses in Abu Dhabi and in Dubai. The meeting was organized by a colleague from the History Department there, and originally we'd been told we'd be meeting students who attended my Joanna Waley-Cohen's lecture on the Silk Road the previous Monday night. In the event, however, the meeting was almost all faculty, with only one student present, and it was explained to us that to have more students present would have required elaborate security arrangements that had proven too difficult to arrange.

The session was nevertheless rewarding: it moved from an exchange of ideas about how to teach the history of the Silk Road to a broader discussion of the challenges of living and teaching in Abu Dhabi. The Silk Road has been added this year as a component of the core "colloquy" course that students are required to take, and we discussed the relative merits of having a core program with common required courses, versus one that has more "a la carte" offerings. Overall, the tone of the meeting was less about caution than about opportunity, and I met a number of colleagues with whom I'd like to be in touch about research projects in Abu Dhabi that I'm planning to propose.

Wednesday morning began with a visit to the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, which is open to non-Muslim visitors in the morning from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. Gleaming white and dominating its surroundings, it's meant, I think, to evoke both the grand mosques of the world and the Taj Mahal : in addition to being a house of worship that will be able to accommodate 10,000 people for prayers, it is also the burial place of the revered Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyam, the man who ruled Abu Dhabi from 1966 until his death in 2004 and who was the first president of the United Arab Emirates.

Visiting the mosque filled me with a sense of nostalgia, bringing me back to my visit to the Middle East twenty-five years ago, and memories of a visit to the Dome of the Rock, followed by my first visit to Istanbul. I expected then that I would return to the Middle East before very long, particularly since one of my best friends from college moved to Tel Aviv. But it hasn't happened, though I did make it back to Istanbul i 1989. But that's 20 years ago now!

Compared to the grand mosques in Jerusalem and Istanbul, the Sheikh Zayed mosque feels "new" but not "modern," and I think it's a find translation of the ancient traditional grand mosque into a contemporary idiom. The materials used in its construction are exquisite, and the interior of the mosque--which boasts the largest hand-made "Oriental" carpet in the world--is stunning. The Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi presented NYU's president John Sexton with a (much, much smaller) reproduction of the carpet as a memento of the agreement between Abu Dhabi and NYU, and it now adorns Sexton's office.


The mosque isn't quite done: work was still being done on the area in front of the mosque (both landscaping and a little construction), and visitors enter from the side. Women visiting the mosque who are wearing western clothes are given black abayas and head scarves to wear when entering the interior courtyard of the mosque, and as in any mosque, you remove your shoes shoes before entering the interior. As a result, you can feel just how luxurious that carpet is!

After spending an hour-and-a-half at the Museum of Islamic Civilization in Sharjah, we continued on our way back to Abu Dhabi via Dubai. We could see examples of  traditional wooden ships--the dhow--docked along the waterfront. Out of the window I caught a glimpse of a grassy area by the corniche in which red flowers had been planted to spell (in English) "Smile You're in Sharjah" (Apparently, there's also one in Arabic on the other side.)

We stopped at the Spice Souk in Dubai, with its low tin roofs and winding alleys. One of my colleagues expressed relief at being in a place that felt a little bit more connected to everyday life than the aggressively modern urbanity we'd experienced so far. It wasn't, of course, like the souk in Cairo which has the feeling of being really old. But it did convey a sense of being older than much of the city around it, a sense of not having been built just yesterday. And it was full of wonderful scents, emanating from the bags of spices lying open in front of small shops. We ventured into one of the shops, where the merchant was pleased to offer us smells and tastes: we ate two kinds of pistachios and some dates, as we looked at the variety of spices he had to offer. My French Department colleague jovially displayed her bargaining skills, and ended up with a small container of top-grade Iranian saffron at a much, much lower price than you'd find in New York.


We wandered through some neighboring souks: my History Department colleague was in search of pashminas and some kind of traditional knife to give her son (who collects them): we  found the former, but didn't have enough time to explore enough to find the latter.

.


As evening fell and the light mellowed, we heard the call to prayer. And then we drove to the Jumeirah Mall. On the way we passed some of Dubai's famous buildings: the almost-completed Burj al Dubai, now the tallest building in the world; the infamous ski slope (no, we didn't stop); and the line of towers that have created a virtual cliff facing the sea and apparently significantly altered wind patterns in the city. Our NYUAD liaison told us that as we entered the mall we'd have a fabulous of what is arguably the most beautiful building on the Dubai skyline, the Burj al Arab, a self-styled "seven-star" hotel that only guests are permitted to enter. He was right about the view.

We were told that Jumeirah was one of the first self-contained swanky ex-pat districts: it offered rich ex-pats so many services (entertainment, recreation, and shopping) that they would never have to venture into the rest of the city if they didn't want to. The conceit of the Jumeirah mall was to offer fancy modern shops in a souk-like atmosphere. The contrast between the Spice Souk and the Jumeirah Mall sums up one of the challenges that faces NYU Abu Dhabi: how to give our students a sense of connection to the history and traditional culture of the region in which they'll be studying, even as we promote the site as a gateway to the new global culture of the twenty-first century? Will it be enough for NYUAD students to feel that they have had some new-fangled "global" experience? Won't they also expect an experience that is also authentically "Arabic" or "Islamic," steeped in the rich history of the region?

And that's something that Abu Dhabi is struggling with as well. How to preserve a sense of the past as the emirate rushes forward into the future. On our first day, we met with representatives from ADACH (the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage), which sponsors both presentations of Western culture (the New York Philharmonic's visit to Abu Dhabi and Al Ain this weekend, for example) and seeks to preserve and promote "heritage." The idea of "heritage" itself seems to be inflected by a nostalgia for the relatively recent past, dating back to the beginning of the ninetieth century at the earliest. There's a nostalgia for the pre-oil days of pearl fishing and nomadic desert culture, but seemingly much less interest in the very ancient past of the region.
 

The Emirates lack the kind of grand residue of the past that one finds in, say, Cairo or Istanbul. What the Emirates have is present grandeur. And that makes visiting and--I imagine, living in--Abu Dhabi or Dubai a very different kind of experience from visiting or living in one of the ancient cities of the Middle East.

Sharjah, which is right next to Dubai, is more conservative than its neighbor. No alcohol is served in the emirate, which was named the cultural capital of the Arab world by UNESCO because of its excellent museums. The American University of Sharjah there was founded by the emirate's ruler, Sheikh Sultan bin Mohamed Al-Qassimi III, and it is a forerunner of NYUAD insofar as it is a school that offers a co-educational experience. The Shaikh also founded the more traditional University of Sharjah, which lies just down the road from AUS and offers separate but equal facilities for men and women.

At AUS we met with the Dean of Arts and Science, Williams Heidkamp, and with faculty from a variety of fields including literature, mass communication, history, and international relations. The overarching subject of our discussion was the challenge involved in teaching the humanities in an Islamic setting: where were certain intellectual and social lines drawn, what kinds of interaction between instructors and students were permissible outside the classroom, and where might the expectations of Western teachers and students from the Gulf region clash, what was it like to live in an emirate if you were an ex-pat? Instructors at  NYUAD will face many of the same challenges, though our student body is likely to be more demographically diverse than that of AUS. The AUS faculty members seemed skeptical both about our aspirations to import some of the residential education models that we use back at NYUNY and also more generally about the prospects for a liberal arts college in the Emirates. Their institution is dominated by its engineering school, apparently, which is the first-choice program for the majority of entering students. Arts and Science seems to get those who don't find engineering congenial and who are able to convince their parents that a liberal arts curriculum is worthwhile. They wished us well, however, hoping that if NYUAD is successful, it will enhance the status of the liberal arts in the region generally and thereby help them. We expressed our hope that we would be able to establish scholarly ties with AUS and foster the creation of communities of scholars with mutual research interests.

After lunch at  the school cafeteria, we headed over to Sharjah's Museum of Islamic Civilization, a domed building with two long wings. I spent most of my time in the hall devoted to the history of Islam and found myself reminded of the very central role that Hagar and Ismail play in Islamic belief and more specifically in the hajj pilgrimage. And it made me worry just a little about the lecture on cosmopolitanism that I'd be giving the next day. The lecture's second half uses Moby-Dick as a case study in the dynamics of literary cosmopolitanism, and I wondered whether any in my audience might find my treatment of "Ishmael" disturbing or insensitive. Perhaps more significantly, I began to think about the significance of Melville's treatment of Islam in the novel, which draws on stereotype far more than his treatment of Zoroastrianism. (I'm thinking particularly of the episode involving Queequeg's "Ramadan'" but also about offhand references to Islamic and Near Eastern practices througout the book. I started thinking that I should write companion piece to my essay on cosmopolitanism and Zoroastrianism in Moby-Dick that would explore the novel's appropriations of Islam as (I suspect) an example of the limits of its cosmopolitan aspirations.

I'm writing this in a van on the road from Abu Dhabi to Sharjah. We've just entered Dubai. The desert surrounds us.

I'm traveling with three colleagues from NYU and one from NYU Abu Dhabi. I owe my presence here in part to John McCain.

Last year, after McCain chose Sarah Palin to be his running mate and the Republicans received their post-convention bounce, my wife and I decided we needed an exit strategy in case the unthinkable happened. We'd need to find a cosmopolitan space, since the United States would clearly be something other than cosmopolitan if McCain and Palin could be voted into the White House.

Canada? Switzerland. "What about Abu Dhabi?" my wife asked, remembering that NYU had announced plans the year before to  build a campus there on Saadiyat Island. Take a look at one of their official websites, and you'll find that "cosmopolitan" is one of the words that Abu Dhabi uses to describe itself and its aspirations.

"Okay," I said, "I'll mention it to Matthew," referring to Matthew Santirocco, the Dean of the College of Arts and Science at NYU, whom I knew to be centrally involved in the Abu Dhabi effort. I  had to contact him by e-mail anyway about another matter, so I ended my message by saying that I'd love to chat with him at some point about ways to help with the Abu Dhabi effort. I had an e-mail back almost immediately: could he call me at 5:30 that day to talk about Abu Dhabi?
 
As it turned out, Matthew was the chair of the Humanities Coordinating Group for NYU Abu Dhabi, a committee charged with creating a portion of the NYU Abu Dhabi curriculum and then with hiring faculty members to teach there.  Apparently, the Abu Dhabi leadership had decided that the Group needed a representative from English, and my name had come up in part because of my work on cosmopolitanism.  Had someone in English mentioned this to me? No, I said. Kismet, then, said Matthew.

I liked to think that he and I had developed a good working relationship over the years, because of my service to the College over the years, particularly during my stint as Director of Undergraduate Studies from 2001-2004, and also because I'd won some teaching awards and demonstrated a commitment to undergraduate education. So when he invited me to join the Group and started describing its work, I agreed even before he had finished. But I haven't told you about the perks, yet, he said. Perks, I thought. Oh, oh. That means its going to be a lot of work.

And it has been, but it's been the most rewarding  service work I've done at NYU. (We're passing the city of Dubai now. You can see the Burj al Dubai, the tallest building in the world, in the distance. We'll be stopping in Dubai this afternoon.)

It's that rarest of committees: I actually look forward to the meetings. In part that's because of the wonderful colleagues from different departments who are on it, but it's also because of the challenge and opportunity that NYU Abu Dhabi represents. The idea is to create a small college on the Swarthmore model coupled with a robust and well-funded research institute, thereby drawing on the best aspects of both the small liberal arts college and the research-oriented university. NYU Abu Dhabi would be a fully-fledged unit of the university, equal in standing to the Faculty of Arts and Science, offering a degree that would be a real NYU degree and not some equivalent. Moreover, unlike many abroad programs that draw on relatively inexpensive local faculty, NYUAD would offer a standing faculty that would be tenured and tenure-track and whose members would be equal in qualification and distinction to their peers back in New York.
 
"Our partners in Abu Dhabi" (as we like to say) invited NYU to open this campus and are providing generous funding for the venture not because they want to "Westernize" but because they want to engage in a dialogue with the West, presumably both to understand and benefit from some of the insights of Western culture and pedagogy and to expose us to central insights from Islamic culture . For that reason, they have guaranteed us  academic freedom that is unprecedented for their cultures, because they understand that to have what they want - a liberal arts college and a research institution on the American model - we need to have the academic freedom that makes those enterprises possible. In other words, they want us to do what we do, and they're committed to making that possible - despite the difficulties that our conception of academic freedom might pose for them.

It's a bold move and a risky move, both for NYU and for our partners in Abu Dhabi. But I have become convinced that it is the most innovative and most important educational project with which I am likely to be involved during my career.

I know that some of my colleagues at NYU are skeptical: they worry about the NYU administration's motives; they worry about dilution of the NYU "brand" or about the siphoning of resources and energies away from the New York campus; they worry about NYU's labor practices and about labor practices in the Emirates and about some of the problems identified by Human Rights Watch.

I respect those views, but (I'm convinced that one of the great tasks of the 21st century is for the West and Islam to learn how to respect one another and to engage in mutually beneficial conversations. And if we want to help promote change abroad, we can't do it from the relative comfort  of our offices in New York. We have to be abroad, on the ground, living and working with others, engaging in the give-and-take that characterizes real dialogue, which isn't always easy and doesn't have predetermined outcomes.
 
As I've worked on this project during the past year, I've been struck by the quality and commitment of the people involved at every level. Most of them have become involved in NYUAD for idealistic reasons like those I've mentioned.
 
Here's an example: we talked at the beginning of last year about wanting to create a liberal arts college on the Swarthmore model. So what did NYU's president John Sexton do? He offered the retiring president of Swarthmore, Al Bloom, the position of Vice Chancellor of NYU Abu Dhabi (the top position at the campus). Getting to know Al Bloom a little bit has been one of the unexpected benefits of working on the Abu Dhabi project: his intellectual acumen, seemingly boundless energy, and his deep commitment to undergraduate pedagogy make him the right man for the job. It struck me, when I heard about his appointment, that it boded very well for the future of the NYU Abu Dhabi project.
 
Do I have the fervor of the convert? I suppose I do.

Meanwhile, we're arriving at Sharjah, where we are scheduled to meet with a dean from the American University there. Stay tuned for more from the Emirates as the week progresses.

I’m sitting here on 747-400 (KoreanAir Flight 082) on my way to Seoul, where I’m going to be giving two lectures this week.

I’ve got my laptop out, and I’m working on the conclusion to the lecture that I’ll be giving at Ewha Womans University on Friday on the subject of “Why Emergent Literatures Matter.” I promised that the lecture would offer a critique of the idea of U.S. multicultural literatures, arguing instead for the use of the term emergent to describe literary traditions that have been marginalized in the formation of the mainstream literary canon. I’ll be arguing that emergent literatures demonstrate the power of Anthony Appiah’s idea of “cosmopolitan contamination.” Cultures, in Appiah’s account, never tend toward purity: they tend toward change, toward mixing and miscegenation, toward an “endless process of imitation and revision.”

I’m working on a Dell laptop, wearing Sony headphones that are plugged into my left armrest, and listening to tracks from a live album that Queen recorded a couple of years ago with the singer Paul Rodgers. The LCD screen in front of me is currently showing our position, on the southwestern end of our arc below the North Pole.

 We’re at an altitude 34,832 ft with 3,776 miles to go before we reach destination. I’ve watched two movies so far, with 29 more (and a host of other entertainment options) from which to choose. How things have changed in the four years since my last trip, which felt really long.

What a marvel is the age in which we live. We can fly from one end of the globe to another without stopping by skirting the North Pole. And I could pick up the entertainment controller built into my seat, turn it over, and use the built-in satellite phone. With a swipe of a credit card (okay, a few swipes, since it took several tries before a connection could be established), I’m saying goodnight from above the Arctic wastes to my son in New York. It’s costing $0.65 per six seconds but it’s worth every penny, just for the sheer marvel of it.

The world has become so small: this should be the great age of cosmopolitan contact, of peoples reveling in stretching out across oceans and deserts and continents to meet and enjoy one another.

Yet every time you go through a security screening at an airport, it’s brought home to you (as your laptops and shoes and one-quarter Ziploc bag full of liquid toiletry items in under 3-ounce sizes), that we are far away from a cosmopolitan golden age. We can fly from New York to Seoul in under fourteen hours, but peace, love, and understand seem to be receding faster and faster with each technological leap forward. How sad that the very technologies that should bring us all together become the tools that are used to keep us all apart.

Not a radically new insight to be sure, but you see it from a slightly different perspective at 34,832 feet.